Self-awareness is the foundation and starting point of SMART Love. The skills of SMART Love are built on how aware we are of ourselves. Self-awareness goes beyond just being aware of our emotions to being aware of the many complexities that make up who we are as God’s incredible creation. It involves being able to clearly articulate our values; know what’s really important in our lives; understand our tendencies in certain situations; and identify our dreams, goals, and desires for our future. It’s the ability to more fully know ourselves from the inside out.
Self-awareness takes time. But our way of life typically does not allow much time or space for introspection. Our lives are too busy, and we end up overwhelmed by all the things that need to be done on a day-to-day basis. We only have time to react to the pressures of the moment, and there are plenty of those lined up ready to grab our attention. We get up early, grab breakfast after attempting to exercise, help get breakfast for the kids, and quickly check our emails before heading to the office or taking the kids to school. It hardly seems like the day has started and then the kids are home. We plan a meal or quickly grab takeout, straighten up the house, pay the bills, mow the lawn, help the kids with homework, and finish some project we started on the weekend. Then, if we have time, we can crash and watch some TV.
The weekends aren’t much different. There are projects that need to be attended to, and we shop for food, wash and gas up the cars, and maybe, if we can, hit a movie. Add to the list all the other things we “ought” to be doing—things our parents taught us to do, our boss needs us to do, or our pastor is “expecting” us to do—and is it any wonder that most of us live what is called “the unexamined life”? The feeling that we are nothing but human doers is really quite an accurate description of how we end up. What ever happened to our living as a human being? We just don’t have enough time to worry about that!
Gradually over time, we lose the sense of who we really are and even the sense of what is really important to us. It’s not that all our busyness is invested in unimportant things. It’s more that we don’t have the time to look inward and remember that our dreams, our values, and our feelings were about what we used to think was really important. When we are forced to slow down and reflect on our lives, we don’t really like what we see. We feel trapped, we get antsy, and worst of all, we don’t know how to break out of the cycle of busyness.
The cost we pay for our busyness—when we live like we are “human doers”—is that we will eventually prioritize our work, our kids, our friends, our church, and even our extended family over our marriage. In spite of what we tell ourselves, we will push our marriage off to the side and tell ourselves we’ll deal with it when we have more time. We know marriage takes work, but we don’t have time for that much effort right now. Maybe later, when the kids are grown and the finances are more stable, we’ll have the time and the energy to work on our relationship. But in the here and now, since we don’t have time, we end up simply reacting as we struggle with understanding the emotions of our spouse, our kids, our co-workers, and even ourselves.
As human doers, we also live in a state of emotional and spiritual deficit. It’s hard to “be with” someone; it’s much easier to “do for” someone. We “do” for our kids, our boss, our co-workers, our spouse, even God. We fool ourselves about the relationships we think we have through social media, as we spend time texting, on Facebook, or on whatever the latest social media trend happens to be. If we are alone for a moment without our smartphones, we realize we have a pervasive lack of self-awareness—we can’t define what’s really important to us beyond the moment. This is especially true when it comes to our inability to experience any positive emotions. What we do experience are the negative emotions of fear, sadness, shame, and anger. Eventually, we will end up becoming controlled by either our fear or our anger, and/or we fall into depression as we struggle with a sense of guilt and shame over not doing enough.
We find ourselves having a short fuse, always hurrying, our mind always racing, especially when we are trying to go to sleep. We’re easily triggered by other people, especially our spouse, and we say things we later regret. No matter how hard we try, we can’t seem to catch up. We feel a lot like Paul when he said, “I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate. . . . I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway” (Rom. 7:15, 19). So what do we do? There is an answer.
Self-Awareness—the Path to Emotional Health
All of what we’ve described so far is what happens to us when we are lacking in self-awareness. Self-awareness is basically a sense of knowing yourself. God’s desire for us is that we know ourselves. Paul says not to “think you are better than you really are. Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves” (Rom. 12:3). I have to know myself in order to honestly evaluate myself.
Add to this Socrates’s admonition to “know thyself,” and we have the starting point for change. To know ourselves is another way of saying we are to become more and more self-aware. It’s the skill we can and must develop, as it affects every relationship we have as human beings. It involves a myriad of things—we must know our values, our dreams and desires, and our emotions. That’s the goal if we are to be all that God meant us to be.
But first, in order to begin the process of knowing ourselves better, we must make the effort to slow down our lives. How do we do that when there are so many demands on our time? If slowing down sounds impossible to you, start by answering the following question: What pressures or demands make it so hard for you to slow down?
Take some time, think it through, and write down your answers, then evaluate and prioritize them. Ask yourself what stops you from dropping the demands on your time that are at the bottom of your list. In fact, let’s be bold: move the bottom three things on your list to a “do not do” list!
Second, evaluate your ability to experience what is called your “observing ego.” How aware are you of the part that is able to watch yourself? Author William Styron described his battle with a deep and pervasive depression, the sense that he was always “being accompanied by a second self.”1 That was the way he described his observing ego. It was a part of himself that he could watch and talk to about what he was doing or thinking.
Most of us are aware, to some degree, of having a “second self” whose main purpose is to observe ourselves. It is a part of us that is developed as we are growing up, and it is basically our ability to step back from an experience and be able to evaluate ourselves as if we were watching from outside ourselves. We see what we just said or just did, or how we reacted to what just happened. It includes the idea that we are able to have a conversation with ourselves about our emotions, our tendencies, and our behaviors.
The third part of this process is to be able to articulate your core values. What is most important to you? What matters the most to you? This is not as easy as it sounds. One man said that his wife was the most important thing in his life. She protested by saying that his work was more important to him. To her, he worked hard because it was his priority—the most important thing in his life. She challenged him by reminding him that if she died, he would still be working. As we talked about it together, he was able to see his wife’s point, but then added, “You are the one who gives meaning to my working hard.” His struggle was to become more aware of the reality of how he balanced his priorities between his wife and his work, and to become more aware of how his behavior affected her.
Another man said to his wife, “You are my priority.” When I asked her where she thought she was on his priority list, she said, “I may be as high as number five, but no higher.” I pressed him by asking, “Why do you think your wife puts herself at number five on your priority list and you say she’s number one?” He couldn’t come up with any answer. He wasn’t aware of what he was doing that led her to feel that way. He had to first deal with the reality that she felt she was fifth, regardless of where he thought he placed her. That was her experience of him, her reality of their relationship. As they engaged in some honest discussion together, they both became more aware of not only themselves but also how they affected each other in their marriage.
Self-Awareness Defined
We’ve been talking about self-awareness in general, as it is part of our emotional growth process. Now let’s look at self-awareness in reference to SMART Love. In that context, it means we begin to develop a greater awareness of our own emotions as we experience them in the moment. It includes the idea of understanding our behavioral tendencies when we experience a particular feeling or emotion and being able to stay on top of our reactions.
Obviously, the issue of self-awareness goes beyond what we are feeling emotionally. Let’s consider how emotions affected Don, Pat, and Kimberly from chapter 1. They seemed to have access to their world of emotions, but they lost control as they got caught up in the emotional outbursts of their anger. Later, they might have felt some shame as they regretted what they said or did. They couldn’t recognize an emotion when it was happening, nor could they manage what they were experiencing emotionally before it took over. Obviously, they were not very aware of who they were and didn’t know what was really important to them.
Angie’s parents and Jerry might have thought they were more in control of themselves since they had long ago shut off their emotions. They might have actually believed they could survive in an emotionless place. The truth is, they did not possess self-awareness in general, and when it came to feelings and emotions, they were clueless. If they were honest, they would tell you that the only emotion they actually didn’t allow themselves to experience was anger. In the end, they were controlled by their fear and their shame, and they struggled with depression.
It seemed obvious that Don, Pat, and Kimberly could sense they were becoming angry and knew they were angry when the conflict started. But they were unaware of their behavioral tendencies related to how they would react to their anger. Only in reflecting later could they see how their anger controlled them and their behavior. When they were first becoming angry, they simply reacted. It’s almost like their anger suddenly appeared out of thin air and took control. And even though Pat was trying to stay calm, her anger quickly controlled her as she reacted to Don’s anger.
There is a principle that says we cannot tame our emotions unless we can name them. We’ve already noted that men often struggle more than women with being able to name what they are feeling. They generally hide their emotions, and they also deny them. To the typical man, becoming emotional is a sign of weakness or of a loss of self-control. So the first task for men is to learn how to name their emotions. To help in that, let’s look again at the chart from chapter 2 that describes some of the feelings associated with the four core negative emotions. The feelings are arranged in intensity from top to bottom.
| Anger | Fear | Sadness | Shame |
| Furious | Terrified | Depressed | Sorrowful |
| Enraged | Scared | Alone | Worthless |
| Irate | Petrified | Hurt | Disgraced |
| Seething | Panicky | Hopeless | Mortified |
| Upset | Apprehensive | Somber | Apologetic |
| Frustrated | Frightened | Distressed | Unworthy |
| Annoyed | Nervous | Moody | Embarrassed |
| Irritated | Timid | Blue | Regretful |
| Touchy | Anxious | Disappointed | Uncomfortable |
Once you and your spouse are able to name the feeling or emotion, the second step is to begin to think about what you are experiencing when you feel it. This is part of the reason why you will need to slow down. It’s not a typical behavior to think about what you’re feeling or to ask what you’re thinking about what you’re feeling. However, try to identify what kind of thoughts trigger that emotion or feeling. This is especially important when a feeling seems to come out of nowhere—suddenly it is there and it is intense. But it didn’t just appear; there was a trigger.
Our emotions are triggered by the part of the brain called the limbic system and, in particular, a small part of that system called the amygdala. The amygdala is our warning system, and it is connected to our left prefrontal cortex—the decision part of our brain. The amygdala is designed to prepare us to meet some threat through either the emotion of anger or the emotion of fear. That’s why one of those negative emotions will typically be our basic go-to stance emotionally when we are stressed. Early in our lives, emotional patterns are established as we approach perceived threats with either an angry response or a fearful response. Over time, pathways develop in our brain that instantly lead us to experience anger or fear when we feel threatened in any way. The threat could be as simple as being misunderstood.
Our Basic Emotional Posture
We typically choose to go to one of the basic four emotions when we are under stress, or when someone has pushed our buttons. We call that our “basic emotional posture,” or BEP. There is usually a history to what primary negative feeling we experience, especially when it can make us feel so out of control. Identifying and understanding what our fallback emotion is will involve some historical remembering. For example, if you have a tendency to become angry as opposed to fearful, where and how did that begin? How did that pattern develop? What’s at the root of your anger?
If your basic approach to the stressors of life is to experience fear, how did that come to be? Can you remember feeling fearful as a child? Which parent showed their fear more? How did that same pattern develop in you? If your basic emotional posture takes you instantly to toxic shame, you must have grown up being shamed. Who was the primary person putting you down? Who always made you feel like you were less than the others in your family? Or was it a general pattern where everyone shamed everyone else?
Sadness, or depression, as a basic emotional posture is usually related to growing up in what is called a depressogenic environment. This is a term used primarily in relation to substances that make us feel depressed, such as alcohol. When you drink too much alcohol, you experience depression. A family can also be a depressogenic factor when one or both parents are depressed, and depression just seems to be the family’s lot in life.
When we refer to our BEP, we are also, as mentioned earlier, talking about what are often called our buttons. Our buttons are our automatic responses to situations or people. They were programmed into our subconscious mind in the first six or seven years of life. Because our subconscious mind is so quick, it responds instantly to hurtful patterns of behavior that we are probably not even aware of until it happens. Our quick response reflects what we saw and experienced in relation to our parents and others during those early, formative years.
For example, if your basic approach to stress issues is to respond with fear, it is likely that your parents exhibited a lot of fearful responses to the issues of life, and they may have treated you in a way that made you fearful. Or if one or both of your parents were angry a lot, that’s what got programmed into your subconscious mind. Understanding the roots of our automatic responses is an important part of becoming more self-aware emotionally. As we said, in order to become more self-aware, we have to take the time to think about our basic emotional posture, and we have to understand the roots of our emotions, as they set the stage for our behavioral tendencies.
Which is your basic emotional posture? Is it anger? Is it fear? Is it toxic shame? Or is it sadness and depression? Remember, our basic emotional posture is where we end up emotionally most of the time when under stress.
The Process
First, we are learning how to name an emotion, and second, we are taking the time to think about how we respond when we are experiencing that emotion. In other words, we are asking ourselves, “What am I feeling when I have that response, and what am I saying to myself?” Pat was able to do this once she could name the feeling of fear when Don questioned her. Then she had to identify what she was telling herself when she experienced fear, not only in relation to Don but in other situations as well.
The third part of our becoming emotionally healthier and more self-aware is to understand that our emotions have a purpose. There is always a reason for what we feel. That means we need to take the time to ask why, in the here and now, we are experiencing a particular emotion. If anger is our typical response to stressful situations, what is the purpose of it? In many cases, anger is used to push people or situations away. It’s like we are saying, “I don’t want to deal with this now, so I’ll get angry and hopefully you will go away.” Remember, though, there is a healthy side to the emotion of anger when it is experienced as a protest against some wrong.
Fear, on the other hand, doesn’t push other people away. Its motivation is to prompt us to either freeze or run away. Anger is movement against someone or something that is being perceived as a threat, while fear is our attempt to move away from someone or something that appears to be a threat. There is also a healthy side to fear that says, “The danger is too great; get away from here.”
Fear and anger are the same in terms of what happens inside us physically. Let’s say you are visiting an old friend who works in an inner-city ministry. He lives in a very unsafe neighborhood. He’s busy in the evening, so he suggests you go sightseeing without him. “Just be back before 10:00 p.m. and you’ll be safe,” he tells you. Well, you get carried away and it’s after 11:00 p.m. when you get to his place. You have to park several blocks away, so you say good-bye to the rental car—it’ll probably be gone by morning.
As you walk toward your friend’s apartment, you hear someone behind you. So you walk faster, and they walk faster too. Fear is a healthy emotion to experience as you begin to run and so does the other person. Just as you finally get to your friend’s apartment and get the key in the door, the footsteps stop behind you, and your friend says, “Gotcha!”
You now joke that instantly he became your former friend, for the fear you had experienced moments earlier instantly shifted into anger. You were angry that you were set up by your friend. It wasn’t funny to you. The point is, though, that your brain prepared you first to take flight and then, in a microsecond, shifted your fear into anger, preparing you to fight. But you didn’t, and years later you laugh together about the experience.
When it comes to shame, there are two types we can experience. If we’ve done something we shouldn’t have, we should experience genuine shame over our actions. For example, if we just told someone a bold-faced lie and we feel shame over it, that’s genuine shame. Its purpose is to motivate us to make things right. This is a healthy experience of shame—there is something in the here and now that we are genuinely ashamed of, and rightfully so, and we need to repair what we’ve done.
The other type of shame is toxic shame, and when we experience it and examine why, we find there is really no valid reason for us to currently feel it. It’s the type of shame we have in the present that is based on things we experienced in the past, such as things we were told while growing up. For example, we may still struggle with toxic shame because as kids we were told that we were worthless or wouldn’t amount to anything. Those kinds of messages lead to a posture of toxic shame. If that posture is where we go in stressful situations, we need to identify its source and then argue against its validity. It is something we were taught, and it didn’t come naturally!
If sadness is your basic emotional posture in life, its purpose is to get you to deal with the ungrieved losses you have experienced. Depression is usually tied to losses you have experienced in your primary relationships that you haven’t grieved properly. To understand the roots of sadness and depression, you may need to talk with a professional counselor. The roots of depression are difficult to get access to, and understanding how they affect you is often too challenging to do alone.
The Importance of Moods
When we talk about our preferred stance in the face of stress, we can sometimes call that stance a mood. For example, if we typically go to anger as our predictable stance, we may be in a continual “irritable” or “touchy” mood. Or if we take fear as our basic stance, we may describe ourselves as having an anxious mood or having a feeling of our nerves constantly being on edge.
The feeling words can also describe our moods. It’s important to note that our moods affect those around us. If I’m in an irritable mood, I will have an impact on my spouse and my family, and even my co-workers. Being self-aware emotionally means I am also aware of my moods as I experience them, and I take action to get out of that negative mood.
Several studies have demonstrated the power of a mood being transferred to others. In one study, three people were asked to sit together in silence in a small circle for one to two minutes. They found that the mood of the most emotionally expressive person was transmitted to the other two people even without a word being spoken. Another study noted that when a couple sits together silently for fifteen minutes, their heart rates and breathing rates become in sync with each other.
A Healthier Don and Pat
Let’s assume that Don and Pat have been working on becoming more self-aware of their emotions. How might their conversation have gone if that were so?
Here are some of Pat’s new thoughts: Oh no, Don’s home and I didn’t get this finished. I’m feeling nervous because I don’t want to set off an explosion. (She can identify in the situation what she is experiencing emotionally.)
Don walks into the room and sees what Pat is doing, and he still asks, “What’s that?”
Pat’s response is clear and direct: “It’s a gift for my mother, and I’m already feeling anxious thinking you’re going to get upset about it.” (She states and owns what she is feeling.)
Don’s immediate reaction is to get defensive, but he is aware of that tendency, and he quickly puts a stop to those thoughts. Then he becomes aware of a growing feeling of anger as Pat’s buying gifts for her mother touches on an old pattern that triggered their arguing in the past. He is still concerned about the fairness of how Pat treats the two mothers, but this time he says something like, “Wow, I don’t want to go down the path of that old argument again. I started to get angry almost automatically, and I don’t want to be angry. I hope you’ll help me pick out something nice for my mother’s birthday.” (He also states and owns what he is feeling and is therefore able to avoid being controlled by his negative emotions.)
For both Don and Pat, being aware in the moment of what they were feeling helped them to stay calm. They were able to describe the feeling to the other person. They also realized they had choices in how to respond and were able to break free from some very destructive patterns. Pat owned her tension, and Don owned his experiencing the early stage of getting angry. They were able to show their care for each other as they built on the foundational principle of SMART Love—self-awareness.
So the question now is, how can we develop a greater sense of self-awareness in general and, more specifically, a greater awareness of our emotions? That is the purpose of the next chapter.